Introducing the White Mirror

I’ve been hooked on ‘Black Mirror' since the Netflix series’ inception. If you haven’t streamed, think ‘The Twilight Zone’ – but with digital innovations as the bad guys, warping our individual realities in subtle, unsettling ways.

Wednesday’s announcement that Open AI would acquire Jony Ive’s io startup ushered in a real possibility that a white mirror is coming. As skeptical, enamored, fearful as we’ve been of AI – what if there’s a future in which devices can enhance our humanity?

Apple was started up with this notion: that computers, made simple, intuitive, even friendly, could extend our creativity. That idea spread into extending our work, creative and beyond. And with devices that were beautiful and satisfying to touch and own, Apple opened the gates to technology bringing us joy. The power of function and emotion has built the most valuable company in the world. Ever.

Along the way, a gap has emerged between the life technology offers us and the joy we actually get from it.

We’ve become screen captives. We need to be reminded to go outside. The sensorial joy that handheld devices give us is potentially ebbed away by dependence on them and the doomscroll culture they house. Modern tech is engineered to trigger dopamine responses. That creates habits and, in some cases, dependency. We love it partly because it’s designed to make us love it.

Ironically, Apple may now have become the antagonist from its own ‘1984’ TV spot. OpenAI represents the blonde hero coming to break the screen. With screenless devices that put our own queries in the power seat, OpenAI’s future could be the next chapter in the idea that machines should bring us joy. It could out-Apple Apple.

In the white mirror version that OpenAI could guide, we’d have more hopeful, thoughtful, and inspiring uses of technology. Can our personal technology keep us out of harm’s way, guide us to more pleasurable experiences, essentially edit the bad parts of life? For example, OpenAI-powered applications already help us bridge language barriers – one step further and neural networks could educate anyone on anything, for free, in ways that were tailored to the ways they best learn.

In the vortex of the techno-social revolution we’re experiencing, human-forward is the latest innovation. OpenAI’s Jony Ive partnership makes me think that we’re about to get it right.